PNWBuckeye, it could be worse....

Tuesday, 30 January

My poor cat got out of jail today, but it sure wasn't free. And he's on pretty tight home surveillance, complete with this charming "e-collar" that disorients him and makes it a challenge to do anything besides purr (you know, basic things, like eating and walking). The vet assures me that since his wound and abcess were on his face, he WON the fight (the loser gets an abcess on his hindquarters--and note the pronouns here are all MALE). But, like PNWBuckeye, I don't think he feels like he won much. I do have a supply of kitty painkiller, meloxicam, if you run out of morphine.

Blogger factoid

Monday, 29 January

From today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Study: Blogs more hype than hit

Here's an interesting tidbit. The Sacramento Bee reports that, according to MRI Research and CBS chief research officer David Poltrack, only 8 percent of Americans read blogs.

"One of the things that's probably overstated by the press is how many people are visiting online blogs," Poltrack said in a presentation to TV critics recently. "I think you all blog each other, but I'm not sure the rest of the world is joining in the process that much."

The 8 percent figure is based on a survey of 20,000 people. In a conversation later, Poltrack told the Bee that he would guess the majority of people who do read blogs are bloggers themselves.

"That does not leave a whole lot of real people who spend their time with blogs," he said.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/301394_tf229.html

Tandem treks

Sunday, 28 January

Saturday: 79 miles on the tandem. Beautiful back roads from Snohomish, past Lake Roesiger, into Monroe. Glacier Peak and a bunch of mountains nobody could identify were spectacular, as was Mt. Rainier from the Tualco Valley. A few thin patches of fog at the start, but mostly pure sunshine.

Sunday: 104.5 miles on the tandem. More beautiful roads, this time out to Carnation, Fall City, Snoqualmie Falls, North Bend, Beaver Lake, Marymoor. Mt. Si was just gorgeous. Sunshine all the way.

Funny thing. Back in the last century when I started training and racing my bike, my reasoning was that it was the only way I'd see my husband on weekends (otherwise, I'd be at home, doing chores, while he was out riding, and then I'd want to go "do something" when he wanted to sit on the couch and recover). All these many years later, finally I really did get to see my husband ALL weekend. On the tandem, he never disappears up a climb ahead of me or decides to take a longer way home. (He did try to trade places with a teammate to get away from me, but Kenny was lucky and still had his cross pedals on his rain bike so couldn't swap bikes.) But you know what you feel like after 104.5 miles on a bike, and after all that togetherness, it was probably a good thing that he had to go to a team meeting and leave me at home by myself.

If you need some entertainment early Monday morning, come watch me try to ride my single bike to work. After 183 miles of not steering, I will not be able to point my bike in a remotely straight line. And forget getting out of the saddle.

Bloggers unite

Tuesday, 23 January

http://www.uclick.com/client/sea/dp/

Squares too

Monday, 22 January

My crocheting repertoire includes things besides hats. This is for a colleague's baby shower tomorrow.

Rose-colored glasses

Saturday, 20 January

The temperature at ride time this morning was 36 degrees. The forecast was for a damp, grey day. The last item in my preride bundling-up process was my sweet pair of brand new Axley Ozone glasses. They transformed a cold, miserable ride into a tropical adventure: sunshine, beach, roasty toasty temperatures, huge expanses of white sand. Who would have thought that seeing the world through rose-colored glasses was enough to transform it?

Oh. Wait. Sunshine? It really was sunny all day today in Seattle. The beach? That would be the inch-deep sand across the road all the way down the back side of Hollywood Hill and heaps and piles of it everywhere else. The balmy temperatures? That's what the low 40s feel like when it's been in the 20s and 30s for so long--and I was waaaaay overdressed. The white sand? That was beautiful snow, out on the Woods Creek Road north of Monroe. There was still 3-4 inches of it everywhere out there--in the fields, under the trees, right up to the fog line (and across the road at just one point). It was riding a bike in a winter wonderland, which for me was having my cake and eating it too.

It was pretty much an idyllic January ride today, thanks to my new rose-colored glasses. And only once did I hear my mom telling me that I shouldn't ride by myself out in the boonies.

Something's wrong with this picture

Tuesday, 16 January

I came across this scene on my walk home from work tonight. The street was covered with compact slush--not real wet and not too slippery underfoot. You'll notice that the truck slid sideways (over the landscaping bricks and small trees) into this position. The "door" in the side of the house is brand new.


Somebody (thanks, Ed) sent Old as Dirt a picture of these nifty 700c tires. Thanks to "global warming," he now thinks he needs a rain bike AND a snow bike.


Coach Curly refers to this as the Tandems and Knitting Blog, but O.A.D. thinks it has become a Trees and Knitting Blog. Here's a tree picture too, so you're not disappointed: this is the view from my office.

BTW I'd love to get back to blogging about the tandem, but it has been parked in the living room for weeks, and that's even less exciting than trees with snow, or trucks trying to sneak in the back way.

Not all bad

Sunday, 14 January


Just when I thought everything was snow and ice, we came across this witch hazel tree in full glorious bloom today. What other yellow flowers are you going to find in Seattle in January? These are worth watching for--a gold lining to that snowy cloud.

This is not January

Saturday, 13 January


January is for BIG, looooong miles on the bike.

January is for pruning fruit trees.

There is something wrong here. This must not be January. Did someone add a leap month at the beginning of 2007?

Women's cycling clinic

Wednesday, 3 January

CycleU will offer a Women's Introduction to Racing and Upgrade Class on Saturday February 10 from 1 to 4 pm.

The curriculum for this one-time class is focused on safety and bikehandling, with hands-on skills for 2 hours and 1 hour of in-class discussion of racing fundamentals. Registration is limited to 25 people per class (women only). The class fee is $50; the WSBA will subsidize half this cost, so the cost per rider is just $25. Women who complete the class earn 7 points toward a cat 3 upgrade.

The class will be offered every 8 weeks during the year. CycleU is located at Magnuson Park in Seattle's Sand Point neighborhood.

First-come, first-served registration is available at: http://www.active.com/event_detail.cfm?event_id=1397586

2006 by the numbers

New Year's Day, 2007

Number of tandem partners: seven. (THANK YOU Martin, Sal, Mick, Jamie, Corrie, Brian, and Kent! Jamie, Sal, and Kerry have labels for this that I won't post.)

Number of crits started: six. (And I finished five--and wasn't DFL in any of them. Quite an achievement for me.)

Number of trips to the Willamette Valley: nine. (That's, like, 95 hours of driving, or equivalent to nearly 2.5 weeks at work.)

Number of indoor time trials: twenty. (Yikes! That's more than some people raced on the road all season.)